hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
- the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
- our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
- and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
deleted by creator
I had missed that, and have been spending the past few days wondering why my feed got so serious (and, well, kinda boring). Beehaw has a lot of solid content to be proud of, but a number of the most interesting and thought-provoking subreddits were re-created on lemmy.world’s side. This is your prerogative of course, and I support every decision you take as an admin team, you can only do what you can do; but with this, it seems to me like having an account on Beehaw doesn’t seem to have much of a point anymore…
I just created my new account on lemmy.world, and I’ll keep this one around just in case the decision gets reverted, but this post also serves as my farewell and good luck to this community. 👋
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
You are absolutely right both that this is an issue, and that it is difficult to fix. The divide keeps growing, and the more we separate our conversations the easier it is for both sides to convince us all that it’s the other party that is the problem.
I went back and was looking at the early days of Fark just to see how much things had changed. What struck me the most was how mixed the community was, sure there were extremists on both sides, but there was so much more discussion happening in the middle. So many more people realizing it’s the system that is the problem and neither party cares about the people.
They didn’t even have to divide us, we were all so willing to do it to ourselves as soon as we could. How do we combat this? How do we talk across the lines and have real discussions again?
You will probably end up disconnecting yourself from every growing instance until you’re standalone. A standalone Lemmy instance, what even is the point ?
As a temporary solution de-federation is a fine idea. Permanently, I fear you guys may be shooting yourself in the foot. I joined a few days ago after seeing you were federated with most of the larger instances, and you had a decent number of communities similar to subreddits. Again, I understand how you can see this as necessary to maintain a safe space, but it will most definitely be the death of Beehaw in the long run. I’ll probably swap to another instance for now.
I am not going to stand for this.
I didn’t come here into the fediverse to have instances dictate on their whim that I’ll not have access to something.
This goes completely against the idea of having an unified platform. You can of course do whatever you want, but I’ll not be part of a closed garden.
I think your idea of what federation should look like is not quite right, which is okay, it’s not an insult, it’s new to many of us.
The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.
You’re probably used to common moderation styles on Reddit, where users have more control over content via up/downvotes, and some Lemmy instances may run just like that, taking a more hands-off approach to moderation. But Beehaw is not like that. The goals and moderation style here are different. Beehaw is looking to create a different kind of space, with more control over what’s posted. There are pros and cons to this, which are beyond the scope of this comment to explore. The point is this: different Lemmy instances are run by different people, with different visions and styles. If you don’t like how Beehaw is run, it’s probably going to be a better experience for you, as well as the people here who do like how it’s run, if you find an instance that more closely aligns with what you’re looking for.
But coming onto someone else’s instance and aggressively demanding things conform to your desires or trying to inform the owners of what you will or won’t “stand for” is rude, though. There’s a better way to communicate with people, and in the future I hope you choose grace.
The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.
I dunno, that’s like saying “various mailservers choose to have different rules for their users, and we choose to block some of those mailservers because we disagree with how they’re ran”.
And while that’s technically in your power, and might make sense if it actually is a mailserver that’s sending 100% just spam, it doesn’t really make sense if you block any significant number of normal users.
I think the ideal way forward would be having individual blocklists, where each instance would have defaults for its users, but the user could choose to un-block the remote instances if they wish. Defederation should be reserved only for extremely disruptive instances, and even then there should be an appeal process or a yearly (or so) re-evaluation.
(obligatory I’m not on beehaw but still think this sets a dangerous precedent and should be discussed)
Very well said. I wish I could write out my thoughts as eloquently as this!
“I’m not going to stand for this” Dude just move to another instance. Literally no one is stopping you. It’s the whole reason for the fediverse. They can manage their instance as they see fit. You sound like a complete keyboard warrior, get over yourself and move on.
I think that the whole point of federation is that you, the end user, have the option of choosing where you want to go. You want to use those other instances, nobody is stopping you. You can actually use as many as you want. The instance owner gets to choose what is displayed on their instance, and that’s OK as well. You even have the option of making your very own instance and displaying everything from everywhere. Nobody is dictating what you can or can’t see. They’re just choosing not to be the ones to show it to you.
I’m a bit new to this whole federation thing. As I understand it, it’s supposed to be like email?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard something similar happening in email space. For example: Hotmail can suddenly decide that Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users going forward.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the admins’ concerns. Just trying to understand about federation more.
It absolutely does happen with email, you just don’t notice it. You could just start sending porn to as many emails as you can find. If you use a reputable email provider like Gmail or Yahoo, it won’t take them too long to ban you. If you stand up your own email server and do the same, your whole server will be blocked.
Mostly this ends up as transparent to users, but it does happen and is actively managed.
It’s a bit of a tangent, because public communities are different from private email, but the defederation concept exists in both.
If it’s a bad decision, the fediverse will move on without fragile instances like beehaw. If it’s a good decision, beehaw will be even better from now on.
Just wait and see. The invisible hand of the free market will set things right!
I agree in theory, but if we want to attract regular people from Reddit, this is really bad - if one day they wake up and don’t see half of the communities they expect they’ll just be pissed and probably leave entirely.
This is really hard to process.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told “you can be open and welcoming as long as you don’t dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience”. Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a “one stop shop” for all posts.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming
I think they’re trying to preserve that
users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience
This hasn’t curtailed that freedom in any way. You can sign up at one of many other instances (lemmy.ml for example) and interact with beehaw and lemmy.world and wherever else. In fact you might say this move affords additional freedoms for people to choose their own experience because beehaw will be free fro mthe noise coming from the instances they’ve defederated from.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future
This assumes that the objective is continued rapid growth. Like every instance wants to be a reddit alternative. The opening post pretty much says that’s not the objective.
I would also add that you seem to have overlooked the difficulties OP mentioned in administrating the instance. That’s easy to do coming from commercial sites where people are being paid. It sounds like there are four people who have a little experience, but very little time and resources to spend running the site. Additionally as they said in the post they’re running into the limitations of lemmy’s ability to moderate a large community. One of the fundamental characteristics of volunteer contributors is they’re free to curtail or discontinue their services at any time. I saw one of the admins of beehaw in another post say that it’s been more than a full time job over the last few weeks, on top of all their existing full time jobs. Imagine you’d poured 80 hours over the last fortnight into supporting a community, then telling that community that it’s not sustainable, and that community saying “I can only see this hurting […] hopefully this is a short misstep”
Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.
Well, what happens when whitelisting is being introduced?
If it comes to that why even bother with federation?
Yeah, that’s why I am not too happy with Beehawk’s decision. I think it’s definitely a possibility that we end up with things like whitelists. Defederating from large instances that are not clearly not abuse/spam/trolling/extremist should never be done lightheartedly. When one of the largest instances, defederates with two of the other largest instances, that lowers the threshold for other instances to make even more rigid defederations. And then whitelists are only the next step.
I think this is very disappointing, and exceptionally selfish, to split up some of the largest Lemmy communities while a mass Reddit exodus is ongoing. We should be sticking together and trying to grow the Fediverse as a whole, rather than trying to wall off any one single community at this point. That said, I hope this is the end of this approach, and that smaller instances, particularly ones that support a particular community won’t be pushed aside as well (hello from Lemmy Portugal).
Good on ya. I’ve already blocked several communities from those instances simply due to the sheer volume of low effort content.
The 196 community on shit just works was literally like half of the posts on the all filter yesterday before I blocked it.
Also blocking communities RULES. What a great feature! Like regardless of why, there are tons of things on the internet that I just have no interest in whatsoever! It’s cool to be able to very easily filter that stuff out.
Believe it or not, for some of us, 196 was the reason we came to lemmy in the first place. I can do without reddit, but I can’t do without a non-hateful meme stream.
Ok so TLDR for people who don’t quite know what this means.
Beehaw are going for a walled garden approach and cutting off our access to content from some of the bigger instances. This is fine, it’s their right as instance admins and it creates a safer space for anyone who was only browsing Beehaw local communities anyway. It’s best they’ve done this now before even more people join, but it does suck for those of us who already built a nice feed.
As users we now have a decision to make. If you’re an active member of a community on one of these two instances, you’ll probably need to migrate your account.
If you’re an active member of a community on another instance, bear in mind if that instance grows large you may then be in the same position.
The bad news is there’s no easy way to migrate accounts here like there is on Mastodon, and we’re going to have to resubscribe to everything all over again from whichever instance we move to. Unless anyone knows any handy tool or anything?
(p.s. It seems like I can still click through to my communities on, say, lemmy.world but presumably they’ll no longer update. This is going to really confuse people as there’s no visual indicator that the community is blocked from my pov)
@alyaza I think the “solution” here is worse than the problem.
This is going to be a learning process I think for a lot of people. Not just on federation, but on community building as well. You all seem to be trying to build something here, and I am willing to be patient and participate while it grows. If we get down the road and it just isn’t working, I have faith that there will be open discussion on how to make this community grow while maintaining its ethos and we’ll be here to figure out what is best for each of us individually.
Good on you for taking decisive action at these early stages while we figure out what we want, where we want to go, and how we want to get there on this relatively new platform.
I agree, at first my knee-jerk reaction was against defederation, but I think actually this is one of the cool things about Lemmy and the way it works; you can have relatively isolated pockets and very open spaces, and users can move between them freely. It’s not like leaving Reddit and coming to Lemmy, for example. You can use Beehaw and other instances, and both can serve a specific purpose. I really appreciate this write up because without it I would not have felt good about this decision, but after having read it I get it and I appreciate it.
users can move between them freely
but… they really cant though can they? atm, every community on beehaw just lost a massive chunk of their userbase, and they can’t even move to a diff instance. Masto allows you to automatically move your followers to a new account on a new instance, but there just isn’t that option on Lemmy
I mean, you can create two accounts. I have my Beehaw account as well as my startrek.website account, for example. I use them both for different things, and they both have different vibes. I quite like it tbh.
kinda defeats the purpose of federation though.
Does it, though? Federation is not aggregation. It’s a model of interaction in which a community can curate what other communities they interact with. It can be more nuanced with limiting, as mastodon does, but that’s not an option here yet. I think this is precisely what federation is at its core
agreed, as someone who’s used fediverse platforms for a few years & seen cases of large scale raiding as well as just general infestation between some normal & some pretty bad servers, defederation is one of the main pros of the fediverse. without effective moderation, a community like ours cannot exist for long, & the only way to effectively moderate a foreign server full of literal tens of thousands of users who abide to a completely different law is to cut them off. while having to make an alt can be slightly inconvenient to some, the only alternative for a popular server like ours is to count down until it becomes too large to effectively moderate
Do whatever y’all need to do, appreciate the transparency.
“we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible” so out of curiosity whats on that list
You can find that here in a post by Lionir on discuss.online. I’ll copy the contents of that post below for anyone who doesn’t want to click through.
Here’s a laundry list of sort with tons of tools we’d like to see
- Role for approval of applications (to delegate)
- Site mods (to delegate from admins)
- Auto-report posts with certain keywords or domains (for easier time curating without reports)
- Statistics on growth (user, comments, posts, reports)
- User total
- MUA
- User retention
- Number of comments
- Number of posts
- Number of reports open
- Number of reports resolved
- Sort reports
- by resolved/open
- by local/remote
- Different ways to resolved a report
- Suspend account for a limited amount of time rather than just banning
- Send warning
- Account mod info
- Number of ‘strikes’ (global and local) and reports
- Moderation notes
- Change email
- Change password
- Change role
- Ability to pin messages in a post
- Admins should be able to purge
- Filter modlog to local
- Better federation tools (applications to communities, limiting)
- Applications to communities to allow safe spaces to exist (people should not be able to just “walk in” on a safe space - similarly to follow requests in Mastodon in a way)
- Limiting (Lock our communities down from certain instances but still allow people using our instance to talk to people from those instances)
Obviously considering the moment when this is being made - federation tools are our highest priority.
